If I had to make a wild guess, xAI. The article states they took a job at a government contractor.
It’s interesting (horrifying) to think of the implications actually. People wouldn’t buy this data directly, it’s too obviously illegally procured. But laundered through an LLM to provide “insights” without citation? That’s plausible deniability.
> China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents
I find it difficult to take statements like this seriously.
China has built an incredibly dense manufacturing zone. They've done so by manufacturing more cheaply than other countries do, a key element of which is paying workers less than any European country would be able to do. The rest of what's being described is just what falls into place once you've created that dense, cheap in demand manufacturing zone.
> a key element of which is paying workers less than any European country would be able to do
Not true. Manufacturing labor costs are higher in China than in Eastern Europe. For electronics industry I mean, not sweatshops for clothes and sneakers and aliexpress knicknacks. China stopped being the place to go for cheap labor a while ago. You go there for the expertise.
"distributed neural network" is just AI-bro speak, most likely generated by an LLM.
So I would just ignore that whole comment.
What you said is the truth.
Cheap, efficient, fast manufacturing process. I am a software dev, I happen to have worked with Chinese software APIs related to manufacturing and logictics. Move fast and ship broken stuff on monday, and forget to fix it - that is the reality, but somehow people expect they maintain some level of quality now.
Just try working with products like TikTok, their APIs and documentation, the endless headache you will get will show you how they do itterate, but quality is still only barely a factor.
If you wish to avoid downvotes you might benefit from stating why you think ActivityPub’s decentralization is superior. We’re in a thread discussing an example of Bluesky decentralization so it’s clearly possible.
There's no other network where anything like this is remotely even possible today, much less at such tiny costs! And it turns out it's actually computationally not hard to do so much stuff!
Imo a good time to remember the old chant: "the only war that matters is the war against imagination; all other wars are subsumed by this war." A lot of totally closed people around HN parts. Atproto is one of the new favs for the shallow hate-brigade (alongside systemd, Linux audio, k8s).
Bluesky's end user story is extremely solid. User-driven, first class moderation tooling, inside the protocol. Why do you think the difference in resources required between the two is decisive?
Your opinion sounds too strongly held to be defended this half-heartedly.
It was not designed so anyone could run their own social media for $5. It simply has a fundamentally different design that tries to solve different problems.
No need to call it a "joke." Both solutions can co-exist on vastness of the Internet.
It's more the parts they didn't make federated that hold it back in this regard.
Maybe it's good for end users but that doesn't mean much if it can fall into the same enshittification trap as the others. Also, centralised moderation. I don't want to be dependent on an American company's moderation rules.
There was an article here recently about someone who really tried setting up their own including a did:web and they ran into many problems. https://notes.nora.codes/atproto-again/
There's still many little centralised ties in bluesky and I doubt they'll ever relinquish control completely.
Personally I like nostr a lot more, it seems to be more censorship-resistant and really decentralised.
I don’t see the relevance in the question, the US does not have open borders. And if you’re suggesting AI is somehow magically able to detect citizen from non-citizen then your understanding of AI is woeful.
I don’t see any contradiction with what the OP said, though. You don’t have to be morally superior to still be concerned about a country’s forces killing you.
It's a reversal of the more likely situation which is the us getting it and china following in response. Nuclear weapons anyone? Remember who started those.
I assume OP is talking about an ideological motive to take over the media industry and pivot it in a rightward direction. That’s certainly what happened with CBS News, I think it’s fair to speculate about CNN too.
No idea why OP alluded to it rather than just said it though.
Absolutely. But it’s still relevant because depending on your goal (and your resources) a bad deal that burns cash might still be a positive outcome.
Not dissimilar from Musk buying Twitter, objectively he overpaid by a ton for a business that wasn’t thriving. But I think time has shown that his purchase has paid political and ideological dividends. Which might be worth the money to him.
> The work is good until a company decides to operate with leaner teams and keeps the people committing code.
I'm no AI booster but I think this is exact scenario where AI-driven development is going to allow those non-coding developers to shine. They still remember how code works (and have probably still done PR review from time to time) so they're well placed to write planning documents for an AI agent and verify its output.
I don't think they're mutually exclusive. You could just as easily describe someone with bootstrapping experience as being like an FAA crash investigator who investigates take offs. You get to know exactly what works when moving fast and looking for quick results, and what dooms a short timeline to failure.
> You could just as easily describe someone with bootstrapping experience as being like an FAA crash investigator who investigates take offs.
Takeoff systems aren't analogous to prototype development. I don't know you'd build a prototype plane that's feasible to take to market, without having deep knowledge about how planes are built.
Early design decisions matter. And you don't get to that realisation without dealing with legacy systems where some upstart made terrible decisions that you're now responsible for.
I really don’t think 404 Media having a login gate is a red flag. They’re a business that needs to make money and the alternative to subscriptions is ads, which would be exponentially worse for user safety than what exists today.
It should be more complicated but the way the Trump admin did this isn't complicated. Tariffs were used to punish countries that didn't bend the knee. When they did, the tariffs were removed. So no-one was ever going to build a factory in the US because of tariffs, everyone knew they might go away tomorrow.
This back and forth is the entire issue if you ask me. Whoever you ask in the administration on any given day is going to say the tariffs exist for different reasons. It’s on purpose though - it’s so whoever is arguing for the admin can curate the answer.
Don’t like the cost? It’s a negotiation tactic. Want manufacturing back? That’s what it’s doing actually, it’s definitely a longterm play to bring it back. Worried about the debt? The tariffs are going to be a huge, permanent revenue generator that gets back at countries that “cheated” us. It can't be all these as multiple elements contradict each other.
I’ll take my Fox News slot now please and thank you.
It’s interesting (horrifying) to think of the implications actually. People wouldn’t buy this data directly, it’s too obviously illegally procured. But laundered through an LLM to provide “insights” without citation? That’s plausible deniability.
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